My mount was an incontinent, bow-legged mule that took pleasure nipping at my shins and finally managed to throw me off. I landed in a pile of shit and promptly asked to be transferred to the infantry. In one of many battle-scene close-ups, I had to put a wounded Hessian soldier out of his misery with a thrust of my dagger. The collapsible blade mechanism failed and I would have skewered the poor bugger had it not been for the metal-studded leather sash he wore across his chest. In another scene, mortally wounded by a musket shot, I had to clutch my heart and fall to the ground, backwards. The director found my mimicry of death quite unconvincing so he made me die again and again. I was sore for days after that. I never got to see the picture. Who knows what they left in and what wound up on the cutting-room floor.”
I never forgot this last remark. Uttered by my father without pretense or forethought, I later found it metaphorically rich: Is life but a mere scenario? Why are some plots granted form and substance while others are unceremoniously scrapped? What if a fiction character could seek damages from the author? Imagine if a creation could litigate against its maker, if it could sue for frivolous, unsolicited conception, flawed workmanship, pain and suffering, invasion of privacy, the burden of unattainable potentials and cruel disdain for the absurdity of existence? Oh, what a fabulous class-action suit we could file. And what a thrill to see the miscreants brought to justice at last.
I never shared these thoughts with my father. Although he valued abstract reasoning and often engaged in philosophical inquiry, he considered such mental pirouettes pointless unless they led to some verifiable, useful truth.
“You need exercise,” he once offered an acquaintance that had pestered him with some circuitous suppositions -- “suppositories” as my father called them. “I suggest you use your feet. Walk from l’Etoile to Place de la Concorde and back. You’ll behold superb architecture, cross paths with lovely women and revel in pure symmetry. Symmetry is everything. It calms. It gladdens. It redeems.”
My father didn’t mind antagonizing people if he thought it would do them good. It often did. But, more often than not, the penalty for such solicitude was resentment, followed by alienation. I inherited much of my father’s irreverence and paid the price. Candor and spontaneity, in lieu of hypocrisy and circumspection have proved catastrophic. Speaking my mind has cost me friendships, family ties and prospects for professional growth. In a couple of cases, it damn nearly cost me my life.
*
On May 13, 1936, earning high praise from his professors and from the Sorbonne University School of Medicine jury for his thesis, Contributions to the Study of Breast Cancer in Men, my father, Armin Gutman, the 33-year-old elder son of an impecunious Sighet candle maker, became Dr. Armin Gutman.
Armed with his hard-earned diploma, he went home to Romania a few weeks later. On a visit to Bucharest he was introduced to my mother, a petite hazel-eyed brunette with art deco features and a gentle disposition, fourteen years his junior. They were married in September and left for Paris soon after the wedding. I was born a year later.
*
If my father had long since abandoned all pretense of religion -- a process hastened by Paris’ irresistible embrace and consummated in the ashes of the Holocaust -- he would never regard himself as anything but a Jew. This self-image, a vestige of atavism and the consequence of an indelible Orthodox Jewish upbringing, was, however, altogether secular and devoid of mysticism or sentimentality. He accepted himself the way one accepts having green eyes or flat feet. Asked if he was proud to be a Jew he replied: “I take pride only in my accomplishments; I feel shame only at my failings. I concede all else, including the right to be asked idiotic questions.” In truth, my father found dignity in his Jewishness. He was fond of quoting Peter Ustinov:
“I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.”
Free as he was from doctrinal tyranny, disdainful of absurd beliefs and zealotry, my father found my mother’s synthetic Jewish milieu bizarre, if not grotesque. Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, an enclave of Latin culture in a region suffused with German, Hungarian, Slav and Turkish influences, Bucharest stood worlds apart from provincial Sighet. Unlike Sighet, where Jews formed a monolithic and homogeneous core, Bucharest Jews were stratified, dissimilar and unequal, separated by religious attitudes and conventions, education, professional status and wealth, with the most pious, hence the most recognizable element generally occupying the bottom tiers. Learned, urbane and successful -- my mother’s father was a noted engineer, jurist and poet; her brother was a promising young lawyer; the family my father married into was light years removed from his own. Divested of all discernible Jewish accouterments, perhaps as a hedge against anti-Semitism -- widespread at all levels of Romanian society -- perhaps because conformity and upward mobility took precedence over ethnic identity and survival, they stood in sharp contrast to the unassuming, outspoken Transylvanian Jew that my father would never cease to be.
It’s only by comparing ourselves to others that we discover who we really are.
*
Assimilation had begun early in my mother’s family. Both my grandmother -- born into an upper-middle-class household in the genteel Moldovan capital of Iasi -- and my mother were educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame, a German teaching order known for its demanding curriculum and the severity of its disciplinary system.
“They were mean,” my mother recalled. “They took pleasure in hitting the back of our hands with the edge of a metal ruler at the slightest infraction. Failure to sit erect at our desks elicited a barrage of insults. Crossing our legs or inadvertently exposing a bare ankle drew swift penance, on our knees, in the courtyard, gravel eating at our flesh, in full view of the other pupils. ‘Ill-mannered and unladylike’, sneezing was forbidden.” This injunction was so viciously enforced that my mother, to her dying day, could barely emit a sound.
*
Despite its air of civility, Iasi endured a long history of anti-Semitism. Jews had always been a special target of popular hostility. They were suspected of factionalism and disloyalty; they were loathed for their erudition, envied for their affluence and resented for occupying prominent positions in what was then the second largest center of Christianity in Romania. Wounded national pride and economic woes found relief in mortifying Jews, first through calumny and vilification, then by resorting to wholesale violence. The university of Iasi (Romania’s oldest) and, by osmosis, all educational institutions under its superintendence, were vigorous promoters of that tradition. One of its most notorious alumni was “Captain” Corneliu Codreanu, the self-anointed “savior of Romania from the Jewish scourge” and founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later re-named the Iron Guard. Encouraged by the success of Fascism in the 1920s and 30s, and later, infuriated by the loss of territories resulting from the Russo-German treaty of 1939, Codreanu, and his followers took “love of country” to new heights of anti-Jewish fervor.
In July 1940 Romanian soldiers went on a rampage in Dorohoi, north of Iasi, murdering more than 50 Jews, including five children. Six months later, in January 1941, Iron Guards murdered 125 Jews in Bucharest, impaling some of the victims on meat hooks.
Small wonder that many Romanian Jews, my mother’s family included, eschewed the obvious emblems of their faith and adopted, without necessarily espousing them, the outward trappings of Christianity.
*
What my mother’s family lacked in spiritual fervor was more than offset by a curious amalgam of idolatry, parodies of Christian liturgy, corruption of Jewish protocols, and clandestine excursions into necromancy, palmistry and divination. They crossed themselves in church, which they visited regularly “for inspiration,” (they never set foot in a synagogue) put up Christmas trees, and hosted Easter Sunday dinner parties at which daintily decorated hard-boiled eggs were cracked, dipped in salt water and nibbled on to the accompaniment of rousing “Christ has risen!” cheers.
“A leur manière,”